Among the varied incentives of being in a peer group is that you shall be exposed to different experiences, different outlooks, different ideologies and the most importantly a varied set of movies. Vague, but true… when you are battled down 24x7 with assignments and hardly find any time or space to go out and enjoy your life, and the Laptop being your sole companion who accompanies you for almost every thought process. You figure out the entire way to exercise your emotional self would be to get exposed to artifacts in the form of news articles, documentaries, novels and abundant resource of movies that shall be available thanks to a few benevolent souls who cram it right up to their external HDD with a collection that boasts of almost all titles in the IMDB repository.
Unlike my fellow MBAers, I would rather be on the left-end of the median curve as far as the numerical representation of the movie count.. when others boast of an average 2-5 movies in a day, I can hardly mutter out 5 titles which have been seen till the end for the past 3 months, and seriously this is a deficit I really need to work upon.
A deficit that can only best illustrated best by the movie “12 Angry men” which had been sitting complacently upon my drive for almost 10 days. This movie has also been the chief inspiration for another hindi classic, “Ek rukha hua Faisla” starring pankaj kapoor.
The entire movie, as the title suggests revolves around a single room, wherein 12 members of the Jury sit to decide the fate of a 18 yr old kid who has been accused of killing his father cold-bloodily. Despite this physical limitation of the room, the movie infact soars beyond within the limitless rationales of the mind.I must say, that this was the first movie that has made cringe every set of emotions without being overly made in any sense.
When many of the movie reviews type-cast it as a typical “Achilles against Troy” syndrome, wherein one jury member who must try to persuade the other 11 members to acquit the suspect on trial on the basis of reasonable doubt.True that they may be on their definition, they however cannot illustrate the beauty of the movie by this single claim, and neither do I suppose I can also do entire justice to the beauty of this movie.
Jury duty may or may not remain… but the relevance of this movie “12 Angry Men” shall definitely echo the many portals of corporate life across thy hallowed portals or board-rooms. The entire movie is a beautiful case-illustration of negotiations, influences and a perfect mixture of all the components that go along in a high-profile board-room meeting of today. More than how one Jury member convinces the others, it is a matter of how rational thinking can overcome personal prejudices.
One of the quote that still reverberates in my mind after watching the movie is the one that Henry Fonda makes after he shows how the other Jury are making decisions on blind emotions rather than actual facts,
“It is always diff to keep personal prejudices out of it
Wherever u run from it; prejudice always obscures the truth”
The movie has been used in management seminars as a case study in team building and leadership. The resolution-of-conflict techniques presented in 12 Angry Men have been analyzed and applied to employee efforts to collaborate among themselves to handle issues. The goal is to minimize or eliminate the inefficient micromanagement by company executives in areas in which they are unskilled and/or unknowledgable. This use is most widely seen in the Total Quality Management system used by the U.S. government as well as numerous private sector corporations.
In a May 26, 1999 piece in the New York Times titled "Importance of Being Persuasive; Daimler-Chrysler Merger Made an Art of Making a Case" by Youssef M. Ibrahim, Jurgen E. Schrempp the ex-CEO of DaimlerChrysler who oversaw the merger of the two companies stated about the movie: 'It helps me put my arguments into words, focus on people'.
Need I say more ?
-Deepak
